The OpenDaylight Project's executive director, Neela Jacques, delivered Tuesday's opening keynote at the OpenDaylight Summit and afterwards offered us the opportunity to publish his notes here. Jacques noted he did not stick to the script, but the ideas and sentiments expressed here were all in his talk. The notes have been edited for punctuation and SDxCentral style, and the beginning, which was in skeletal form, has been abridged.)

UPDATE: The video of the keynote is available on YouTube, or just watch the embedded version above

I am humbled to be standing here today as executive director of this amazing project. I have just completed my first 90 days and have been blown away by the vibrancy of this community.

OpenDaylight’s contributors come from all over the world and work for companies large and small as well as from academia. Our community membership has grown from 18 to 33 member organizations with today’s announcement of two new members: Qosmos and Contextream. Each contributor has their own vision of how to bring SDN to the world. Some believe intelligence needs to be centralized; others, that specialized hardware is critical to meeting enterprise and SP [service provider] performance needs. Some are highly focused on multi-tenancy to serve service provider needs; others are more focused on a traditional enterprise data-center architecture. Some think overlays are the way to help the industry evolve in a non-disruptive way.

What is amazing is how the community is stronger rather than weaker due to this diversity. The TSC [OpenDaylight's Technical Steering Committee] has encouraged debate and projects that explore different ways to solve problems. Disparate ideas and technologies are not a weakness but a great strength of this project.

Code is truly the coin of the realm. Debates happen, but at the end of the day he who is willing to produce code “wins.” The TSC [Technical Steering Committee], under Dave Meyer’s wise guidance, has shown to be an independent force, guiding the project’s progress.

OpenDaylight is a Community that is Collaborative

Some of the best stories I’ve been hearing about are the examples of selfless collaboration. A network admin at a university decides to offer some feedback: "Hey you guys, this is all great and all, but you really should add OVSDB support." Developer says, "Great idea, you should do it." "But I’m not a developer," answers the admin. "No worries," says the dev, "if you take the time to learn Java, I’ll do whatever it takes to help you be successful." That admin’s life was changed, and he is now paying it forward helping other folks.

A key developer in crunch time gives up his Saturday to help a bunch of newbies in a hackathon. A board and TSC member stays up late to help a woman on the other side of the world who works for a different company, who he has never met, on a technology he is not an expert on, just because it’ll help make sure they don’t slip out of the release. There are hundreds of such stories (go to Ed Warnicke’s session to hear more, by the way). This is only the beginning.

I should add: It is not just about individuals. Companies like Ericsson are putting significant resources at the service of the entire community. In Ericsson’s case, we they are announcing this week that they have put a complete testing lab for the user community.

Hydrogen

I have an exciting announcement to share. As of this morning, OpenDaylight’s Hydrogen release is officially live. This is a watershed moment for our industry. For the first time we now have a fully featured SDN controller that can be picked up by both developers and end-users and that works with a wide variety of industry leading software and hardware.

Deutsche Telekom, CableLabs, and Italtel all represent great examples of how OpenDaylight can be used for evaluation, education and PoCs. Srini from Deutsche Telekom, who is here in the audience, has leveraged pre-Hydrogen OpenDaylight code to deliver SDN tutorials and as the core of hackathons. Italtel has built a great demo, for their customers, of traffic steering based on network congestion using OpenFlow leveraging OpenDaylight. A couple weeks ago I visited CableLabs, who showed me how they built a PoC with the ability to manage a cable network end-to-end from the cable modems to the back-end routers and switches, all using OpenDaylight. No SDN controller supported the cable industry-specific protocols required, but [CableLabs' engineers] were able to leverage OpenDaylight’s Service Abstraction Layer to build one in a matter of weeks. Cable operators have already shown interest in picking up this architecture for their networks. This is a great testament of the power of the SAL.

Build Full Solutions

I have heard from so many of you in the vendor community talk to me about how you plan to leverage Hydrogen, with a variety of visions and models. We are seeing people building ODL distributions: Inocybe today announced the first OpenDaylight distribution; you will see a number of others come live this year. Others are taking code from OpenDaylight [and] embedding it into the heart of their products — shortening development time and improving their products. Cisco announced the ODL-derived APIC-Enterprise Module last week with a number of other ODL-derived products in the pipeline. IBM today is announcing a new unified controller solution based on OpenDaylight. Others have shared with me their desire to replace their proprietary SDN controllers with the ODL controller. Many will offer significant capabilities back to the community. Radware, for example, is announcing it is making two new code contributions. On top of the Defense4All distributed denial-of-service functionality, they are also contributing traffic redirection and stats management capabilities.

These investments and the many more I can’t announce quite yet point to the fact that OpenDaylight provides a set of building blocks that will facilitate tremendous innovation in our industry.

Recognition

At this time I would like to take a few minutes to recognize some of the people that have made all of this possible. I would like to begin by having your board of directors stand-up.

Now I would like to ask the Linux Foundation team that supports our project to please stand up.

Penultimately, I would like to recognize our Gold and Platinum sponsors, without whom this show would not be possible: IBM, Microsoft, Ericsson, Cisco, Intel, and Midokura.

Last but not least, I want to recognize the developers. Each contributor to the project will receive a coin to represent that code is the coin of the realm. I saw firsthand how much so many of you gave of yourselves to make this release happen; it did not go unnoticed!

I also want to announce our Hydrogen MVD [Most Valuable Developer]. We had many worthy recipients, but one really stood out for the community. In the words of his colleagues: “This developer is one of the original architects of OpenDaylight Controller. He has a deep understanding of the space and the implementation details, and cares deeply about the health and vibrancy of the project. His background is in proprietary software development, but he's taken to open-source like a fish to water. He leads by example with a can-do attitude, rolling up his sleeves to Just Do It, but enables others to be successful by providing insight and guidance.” Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to invite you to stand up and recognize Madhu Venugopal!

[Venugopal is a senior principal software engineer with Red Hat. Jacques' keynote also recognized Cisco engineer Ed Warnicke as the runner-up MVD, noting it was a close race between the two.]